Author: e200102787

Teachers Teaching Teachers—Build and Encourage—Presented by Kathy Spruiell

Your Learning Styles
Your Personality Type

What is your passion?
What are your strengths?

Article: Big Ideas

Team building ideas:
Peer coaching ideas:

What are your take-always? What can you implement
immediately?

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Be the Change you want to see in the world. –Gandhi

Participant Name:

Part One: Distraction and Difference: The Keys to Attention and the Changing Brain
We think we see the whole world, but we actually only view a very particular part of it. We tend to only focus on what is important to us based on our individual patterns and experiences. Because focus means selection, it leaves us with blind spots when we are viewing the world. When we encounter differences between our values, attitudes, emotions, sensory experiences, and cultural expectations, we sometimes deny they have any value. We label them as worthless distractions. This process is how our brain learns not to pay attention to those mismatches that aren't considered important around us. This is called attention blindness, the basic feature of the human brain that when we concentrate intensely on one task that causes us to miss just about everything else. According to Davidson, attention blindness is a fundamental principle of the brain and is key to everything we do as individuals, from how we work in groups, at work, in our interpersonal relations at home and in the office.

Part Two: The Kids are Alright
Nowhere is this idea of considering the brain as more evident than in the experiment that took place at Duke University in 2003. That year, Apple Computers approached Duke about becoming one of its digital campuses. Each school would select a technology that Apple was developing and propose a campus-wide utilization for it. In selecting iPods, Duke landed itself in hot water with plenty of criticism accompanying their selection. Meeting this criticism directly, the students at Duke, freshmen as well as upperclassmen, were extraordinary in their implementation of what Davidson refers to as Project Classroom Makeover. The coursework and information was being crowd sourced to the students and the traditional hierarchical roles of student and teacher were being broken down. Students were not only downloading audio archives, they were audiotaping lectures and being innovative in their uses of the device. One interesting example is medical students putting a stethoscope in one ear and use signal-tracking technology to match what they were hearing in each patient’s chest to the audiotaped catalogued conditions. This in turn could be used by doctors in rural North Carolina or Africa. As Davidson (2011) demonstrates, attention was being focused in multiple directions at once, with the attention including process, interaction, and outcomes, i.e. a mirroring in both directions.
The students at Duke University ran with the device they were given, developing applications for the iPod that Apple could use or not. The consumer was customizing the product to meet their immediate needs and adding applications for the task at hand. According to Davidson (2011), the iPod experiment was not an investment in technology, but an investment in a new form of attention, a student-led curiosity that included inquiry-driven problem solving and could reconfigure the 20th century classroom for the 21st century student and teacher. Thankfully, however, Davidson does not solely rely on technology as the final answer to reconfiguring the classroom of today but rather, a way to consider our attention blind spot. She mentions rigor, relevance, and relationships as the template to reaching our students. Interestingly, it is not technology but our environment per se that may make all of the difference in student success. As Davidson (2011) notes, “...As we narrow the spectrum of skills that we test in schools, more and more kids who have skills outside the spectrum will be labeled as failures. What counts as learning is increasingly standardized and limited…This is the lesson of attention blindness yet again, if you measure narrowly, you see results just as narrowly,” (p.77)

Part Three: Work in the Future
How does the Internet really connect us? The science of attention is key to the workplace of the digital future. How do we design our workspace so that we work effectively? What if the ideal twenty-first century workplace is the home? You succeed by seeing differently! The best is yet to come!
Contributions mean: seeing ourselves as others see us, seeing talents where others see limits, seeing work as part of life, seeing how/when we can work best together, seeing the possibilities of mass collaboration, and seeing the future of work by refusing its past. Success will come from having similar communication styles and very different talents and perspectives. Changes ARE a “given”.

Part Four: The Brain you Change Yourself
We live in a world defined by distraction. Even though we are constantly adapting to changes in our environment, we focus the most on the times when we do the poorest job successfully dealing with change. The feelings of inadequacy, shame, and failure to adapt hit us harder as we age. We live in a society that does not value old age and treats is as something to overcome, deny, and avert.
However, brain research indicates that patterns of learning can be unlearned and our perceptions of aging can change. Our perceptions form our realities. If we believe things are frustrating, elusive, annoying or shameful, they will be. The brain is extraordinarily flexible. We have the ability to seamlessly integrate new technology into our lives no matter how old we are. “We are never too old to learn.”

Davidson, Cathy (2011), Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn. New York, NY: Penguin Group.

Davidson, Cathy (2011), Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn.